(London Review of Books blog) -- Nizar Manek and Jeremy Hodge, 20 July 2015The masters of Egypt’s arcane bureaucracy are still using ‘special funds’, or extra-budgetary slush-fund accounts, to siphon off state revenues for private gain and dispersal to patronage networks. Before he was deposed and locked up, Mohamed Morsi made a few half-hearted attempts to reform the special funds system and repatriate money to the treasury. But Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who recently announced a ‘national anti-corruption strategy’, has made no serious move against this idiosyncratic levy, which flourished under Sadat in the 1970s and increased dramatically under Mubarak in the 1980s. The secret gardens of Egypt’s bureaucracy and deep state may be harder to intrude on than Sisi claims to believe.A report by the European Court of Auditors in 2013 said there were €4 billion in special fund accounts: ‘Their exact size is unknown, as are the purposes for which, and the way in which, they are used.’ Our investigations show that by the end of the 2012-13 fiscal year, when Sisi took the presidency, Egyptian government bodies had siphoned off at least $9.4 billion into nearly 7000 special fund accounts. Some of the money went on bonuses – or unaccountable payments – to people across the bureaucracy, including the Ministry of the Interior, the Suez Canal Authority, the Supreme Council of Antiquities (which manages the pharaoh industry) and the judiciary.https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/07/20/nizar-manek/sisis-secret-gardens/